They must find it difficult, those who have taken authority as the truth, rather than truth as the authority.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Manufacturing Jobs Drop To Lowest Level Since 1941

It doesn't take an economic genius to know why this depression will be prolonged, and why it will be worse than anything this country has ever seen. How do we generate wealth if we produce next to nothing of value that anyone would want to buy off of us? We can only distribute the wealth that already exists, and/or we can devalue the currency by printing up more money. Our government, as is the tendency of government, will opt to do both, stealing the wealth from the "rich", keeping most of it for themselves or their corporatist cronies, and throwing the plebs a few scraps, while printing up new money to finance their obscene expenditures, completely destroying the currency and throwing us all into total ruin. This is the future. Prepare for it, and you will survive. Ignore it at your own peril.

Manufacturing employment in the U.S. peaked in June 1979 with 19,553,000 jobs (data here), and by July of this year manufacturing employment had fallen to 11,817,000, the lowest level of manufacturing jobs since April 1941 (see chart above).

As a percent of the total labor force, manufacturing employment fell below 9% in July (see chart below), the lowest level in BLS history (back to 1939).